from the every-little-thing dept

The DC political world was completely shocked last night as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary against a relatively unknown and completely underfunded challenger named David Brat. His Wikipedia page was set up only yesterday and initially had just two sentences, before the primary victory, leading people to suddenly start filling in more information. Just hours before the victory, the Washington Post had written: "the question... is how large Cantor’s margin of victory will be." Not surprisingly, the Post has now completely erased all traces of its Dewey Defeats Truman article, replacing it with one about Cantor's loss. As the political press tends to do, this morning everyone's digging for the "reasons" behind this unprecedented loss (no majority leader has ever lost a primary apparently) -- though almost all of the analysis is meaningless. Searching for a larger message in all of this is just silly -- as there are plenty of counter-examples. Whether it was about "the tea party," "immigration," "bipartisanship," "fed up with DC" or whatever... it doesn't matter. Politics can sometimes be a bit more complicated and nuanced than the single narrative.

But, on issues of importance around here, it's worth noting that Cantor's loss could be bad news for the NSA in a big way. Cantor was a key part of the House leadership that was instrumental in supporting the NSA and blocking any meaningful attempts at reform. Rather than looking into what the NSA was doing, Cantor wanted to lead an investigation into Ed Snowden. It is believed that Cantor was also a key part of the effort last year to make sure that the Amash Amendment failed.

Dave believes that the Constitution does not need to be compromised for matters of national security. He supports the end of bulk phone and email data collection by the NSA, IRS, or any other branch of government.

While some are trying to spin Brat's victory as a vote against the NSA, that seems unlikely (and again, seems to be people spinning this story to their own particular narrative). It appears that Cantor's loss (and, rest assured, this was much more a Cantor loss than a Brat win) was for many reasons, and it seems likely that the NSA was pretty far down the list. Obviously, assuming Brat goes on to win in the fall (now very likely), as a freshman Representative, he won't be able to do all that much. But just the fact that a very powerful ally of the NSA has lost to someone critical of the NSA is helpful in pushing back on the NSA's control over Congress.

Of course, there is one caveat in all of this. While Cantor cannot appear on the ballot (such as, by running as an independent) in the fall election, thanks to Virginia's sore loser law, he could potentially mount a write-in campaign. And, also, while the Democratic contender in the fall is considered to have absolutely no chance against any Republican listed, it is worth remembering that people also said Brat had no chance against Cantor. Either way, even if this wasn't a referendum on the NSA, it could be bad news for the NSA in losing one of its most powerful allies.

from the same-old-story dept

Tuesday evening, I had a discussion with a friend who was working on patent reform efforts. I said that the reform effort was dead, but my friend insisted that it was being negotiated as we spoke, and that the folks working on it wouldn't be doing so if it died. But, of course, by Wednesday morning it really was dead, and basically everyone who had been working hard on it pointed their finger at one person: Harry Reid. Within minutes of Leahy announcing that patent reform was dead, a whole bunch of people reached out to all say it was Reid's fault. And, that story got out fast. Basically everyone is saying that Harry Reid called Leahy and told him to kill the bill after trial lawyers and the pharmaceutical industry complained to Reid. Reid, fearing a loss in donations from those groups that often support Democrats in an election year, killed the bill.

Most of the reports said that Reid told Leahy he wouldn't allow the bill to come to the floor, but we heard a slightly different story: Reid didn't want it to come to the floor, and if it passed out of the Senate Judiciary with strong bipartisan support, he would be forced to bring it to the floor. That's why it was killed before it even had the chance, and Leahy had to pull it off the agenda without even allowing the Judiciary Committee to vote on it.

This is politics as usual. The same groups killed patent reform efforts in 2004, and basically every two years after that until they got a watered down bill in 2011. Unfortunately, if the same pattern holds, we may not see patent reform until 2021, by which time it too will likely be useless. And all the while actual innovation and our economy suffers.

from the but-that-won't-happen dept

There's been some recent chatter over a Reuters report highlighting that both of the top two officials at the NSA, director Keith Alexander and deputy director Chris Inglis, are retiring in the next few months. Lots of people are misreading this, believing that this is something new, and suggesting that both were either pushed out, or are doing this in response to all of the Snowden revelations. That's simply not true. Alexander's retirement has been widely reported since at least June (and has been covered in a number of other publications as well). Both retirements were planned long ago, and appear to be exactly on schedule, rather than as any reaction to things happening in the news.

This is unfortunate, as it really does seem like there should be some punishment for the widespread excesses and abuses that have been revealed by Snowden. However, what is important to recognize is that this does present a real opportunity for the President to reshape the NSA. It seems unlikely that this will happen, but the President has said that he wants to rebuild the trust of Americans in the NSA and the wider intelligence community, and the choices he makes for who will lead the NSA are a real opportunity to at least take a step in that direction. No one actually expects him to, say, pick a civil liberties activist, but there are people out there who have experience in the intelligence community and who also have shown a respect and appreciation for privacy and civil liberties. Furthermore, finding someone who can present the case for reform -- one which recognizes that "collect it all" is not just bad policy, but bad for actually finding useful information -- would be a big step forward.

The tendency to promote team players and marginalize dissenters creates a danger of groupthink at the highest levels of the organization. The problem is exacerbated by people’s reluctance to tell their bosses bad news. Each level of the bureaucracy gives its bosses a sugar-coated version of the information it receives from subordinates. By the time information reaches the top, it can be dramatically skewed.

This filtering process distorts the information powerful organizations receive from the outside, too. Powerful people are more likely to attend parties and give speeches with friendly audiences than hostile ones. An organization’s press office will naturally give preferential access to reporters who write positive stories about them. As a result, a man in Alexander’s position may rarely encounter well-informed critics who feel free to give him candid feedback on his performance.

It's a good theory, and I'm sure there's some truth to it -- though I'm not sure it really explains everything. It does appear that Alexander was certainly aware of the audits, the IG report and the FISC ruling that all showed massive abuses and problems with the NSA's actions. So I'll posit an alternative theory as to why Alexander legitimately believes the propaganda.

There's a saying that I've heard many times with slight variations:

We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their actions

That is, when we do "bad" things, we often have good intentions, and so it's more difficult for us to view our own actions as being "bad." We meant well. Things just went bad. But when we look at others, we just see their actions, and don't fully understand their intentions -- and thus it's easier for people to assign "bad" intentions to bad actions.

A similar thing may be happening here with the NSA's surveillance. People like General Alexander (and James Clapper and Michael Hayden, and even President Obama) likely look at the things the NSA have done, and believe that they were being done with the best of intentions. That's why they immediately fall back on the defense that none of the abuses were intentional (even if some clearly were).

That's why they seem so exasperated that everyone's so upset with them for the massive spying and the abuses. They keep insisting that if we only were in their shoes, we'd be absolutely fine with how the NSA is acting, and they keep saying that no one at the NSA wants to abuse your civil liberties or to spy on your communications unless you're "bad." Some have assumed that they were implying that they really believe they've stopped potential attacks, but it might just also be that they really do believe that they intend to do "good" things, even if their actions are highly questionable.

Unfortunately, of course, the other famous saying is that the "road to hell is paved with good intentions." Good intentions only take you so far. When you have such a massive, highly questionable program with a very high number of abuses, it no longer matters that their intentions are good, because their actions are simply bad.

from the strawman-alert dept

A bunch of folks sent over an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that goes out of its way to trash "techno-utopians" for believing that the internet is a good thing and can be used to help fight authoritarian regimes, such as the one in Iran. The problem with the piece, written by Evgeny Morozov, is that it basically sets up a strawman that is quite easy to knock down:

It's easy to see why a world in which young Iranians embrace the latest technology funded by venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, while American diplomats sit back, sip tea and shovel the winter snow on a break from work, sounds so appealing. But is such a world achievable? Will Twitter and Facebook come to the rescue and fill in the void left by more conventional tools of diplomacy? Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?

But who made that argument? The answer, which Morozov ignores or conveniently skips over, is no one. No one is saying that Twitter or Facebook will replace traditional diplomacy. No one says that Iranians with access to Wikipedia will suddenly overthrow their government. It's a total strawman that Morozov sets up because it's so easy to knock down and there's no one at all to defend it, because no one's said it.

Instead, what people are saying is that having better tools (which, by the way, go way beyond Twitter and Wikipedia -- but it's easier to dismiss what people are saying by lumping the entire internet into two offerings) can help aid in driving change. But no one is saying it takes away the need for diplomacy or real leadership. No one is saying that the technology can't also be used by the other side -- often to oppress further (as Morozov implies later in his article). The argument is that these tools, if used well, can augment and help those fighting against such regimes. Further, the argument in many cases (though, certainly not all) is that if you provide better communication tools to "the masses," in the long run, that will enable them to more strongly advocate for their own rights. Though, again, that is as a process of augmenting true leadership -- not replacing it entirely.

Morozov uses the failure of Twitter to successfully allow the Green Movement in Iran to effect change and the (supposed) failure of West German TV in East Germany in the late 80s to lead people to tear down the wall, as his only bits of evidence. But, again, that presupposes the wrong thing: that it is the technology alone that leads to revolution. Yet, again, no one claims such a thing. The technology is a tool, and it depends entirely on how it's used as to how effective a tool it is for the purpose. But what many of us who believe in the forward march of technological progress feel is that, in the long run, the greater flow of information opens up more opportunities for people to step into a leadership role, and leverage the technology effectively.

So, yes, it's true that technology alone does not make a revolution. But no one claimed it did. That's just a strawman that's easy for Morozov to knock over. The real issue shouldn't be trying to disprove mythological statements from a nebulous group of "techno-utopian,s" but looking for ways to make sure those other elements are in place to make use of the technology in a positive and helpful manner.